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Alternate timeline

October 4, 1957: Sputnik-PS is launched. The Soviet Union becomes the first nation with orbital capabilities.

May 23, 1958: Juno I is launched. The US becomes the second nation with orbital capabilities.

February 20, 1959: The CF-105 project is canceled by the Canadian government.

March 22, 1959: Equinox is launched from a modified missile fired by the CF-105 prototype number 2. Canada becomes the third nation with orbital capabilities. The Strategic Air Command denies the launch until the Soviets confirm it.

June 19, 1963: Sputnik 23, intended to execute a flyby of Mars, instead crashes into the planet. Worries are expressed about possible contamination.

November 26, 1965: Diamant-A is launched. France becomes the fourth nation with orbital capabilities.

April 26, 1967: San Marco 1 is launched. Italy (consociated with the Vatican) becomes the fifth nation with orbital capabilities. Allegations that the booster was stolen from Wallops, VI by Cosa Nostra infiltrators are vehemently denied by both Italian and American authorities. Due to Italy's postwar restrictions on aerospace capabilities, the mission flies under the flag of the Holy See.

May 18th, 1969: After early Soviet successes, the Americans are now firmly in the lead of what has become the Space Race. Apollo 10 takes off from Cape Canaveral. The mission is a "dress rehearsal" for the planned Apollo 11 moon landing, in which every component of the Apollo stack will be put through its paces.

May 21st, 1969: After a tranquil flight marred only by minor damage to the LM's landing legs, the Apollo 10 stack performs a 89x91 lunar orbital insertion, a little lower than intended.

May 22nd, 1969: A planned 26 second LM descent propulsion system burn is overshot and inserts the LM into a suborbital trajectory. The crew quickly calculate that it would be less risky to perform a "suicide burn" landing than to ditch the LM's descent stage; the descent stage's engine is kept at minimum throttle to avoid having to risk a shutdown and reignition. At 23:40:02 UTC, Apollo 10 lands on the Moon with minor damage to the underchassis. "Snoopy has landed" is heard across the world with a mixture of jubilation and apprehension. After a game of rock-paper-scissors, Eugene A. Cernan becomes the first human on the Moon; black and white pictures of an American flag hand-drawn on the back of an operations booklet solemnly deposited on the regolith are transmitted around the globe. EVA time is kept to a minimum in order to conserve resources. In Houston, engineers are trying to figure out how to get the astronauts back to Earth.

May 23, 1969: After a brief nap, Stafford and Cernan top up their suits' air tanks and break off all nonessential components on the lunar module, including the air tanks, windows, and as much of the exterior paneling as they dare. The resulting reduced-mass "cabriolet" lunar module ascent stage manages to achieve an unstable 20x6km orbit around the Moon. Command-module pilot John Young is faced with the choice of aborting to Earth, or recovering the rest of the crew but having no calculated maneuver to return to Earth after the extra fuel expenditure. After listening to preliminary calculations, he performs a rendezvous with what's left of the LEM, with Cernan and Stafford transferring over to the command module.

May 24, 1969: Engineers at Johnson Space Center devise a plan to gain some delta-V by which the Service Module ballast and any nonessentials are to be bundled up and used as extra reaction mass by using the LM's remaining propellant and explosive bolts, left on its underside, to push it away from the command module. All three astronauts go on EVA to perform the modification; as the air supply in the EVA suits depletes, they are discarded, as is Young's at the end of the EVA. The resulting "spider egg" is shot away from the command/service module in what will be later known as the "get out and push" maneuver, after which the remainder of the craft is spun around and resumes the trans-Earth injection burn.

May 25, 1969: Calculations indicate that the Apollo 10 command module will land somewhere in Eastern Europe, Turkey, or Afghanistan. A brief moment of escalating tension between the Americans and the Russians over recovery planning comes to a halt when Young's elderly mother yanks Nixon's ear on live TV and demands that "the world be here in one piece when my boy comes back".

May 27, 1969: Apollo 10 makes the first American spacecraft ground landing in history, arriving intact near Kladno, in Czechoslovakia, after an extremely rocky reentry due to the missing ballast having misaligned the craft's center of gravity. In preparation for landing in a Warsaw Pact country, the astronauts had been instructed to destroy the flight computer "as soon as it was safe to do so". The town council of Kladno had been warned of the unexpected arrival by an amateur astronomer, and was immediately available near the site with emergency vehicles. Czechoslovak and Soviet media broadcast a triumphal welcome and a lavish banquet given to the astronauts, who were later quoted as "having expected the Soviet inquisition".

May 28, 1969: After a surprisingly quick debriefing by a rather put-upon border control officer, the Apollo 10 crew is repatriated. A formal request by the American government for the command module's return is briskly answered by a Czech local customs office indicating that goods belonging to shipwrecked sailors are subject to quarantine. The precious half-pound of lunar regolith and pebbles that the astronauts managed to recover, however, is returned a day later.

May 30, 1969: Young and Cernan are summarily dismissed from NASA and court-martial proceedings for insubordination are initiated by the Navy. Stafford resigns in protest.

June 1, 1969: An act of Congress requesting a presidential pardon for any and all wrongdoing for the Apollo 10 crew passes by a landslide. Nixon's office signs the blanket pardon the same day; Young and Cernan are released.

July 20, 1969: At 20:15 UTC, Apollo 11 lands as planned, returning the first video images from the Moon. The return date of Snoopy's crew from their world tour is timed to coincide with Armstrong and Aldrin's landing, and the two crews have a "moon party" in Grand Central Station via television.

October 11-13, 1969: Soyuz 6, 7 and 8 are launched from Baikonur in succession. The latter two craft have been modified into a "C-Kicker" translunar stage. After rendezvous, Roskosmos surprises the world by announcing that the crew is deploying packed-flat landing legs on the bottom of the C-Kicker, and will attempt a landing.

October 18, 1969: The Soyuz 6-7-8 compound craft, named Granit, performs a direct descent on lunar soil. Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Gorbatko are the fourth and fifth men on the Moon, respectively, landing in the Sea of Rains. A cursory study of the landing profile prompt Raytheon to formally complain to the Soviet Patent Office about unauthorized use of the Apollo guidance computer.

November 7, 1969: After an extended stay, Granit takes off from the moon and begins its return to Earth. Plans to wait for the Apollo 12 crew in lunar orbit or on the surface are aborted due to life support overconsumption not leaving sufficient safety margin. Despite this, Bhreznev states that the Soviet Union has regained its lead in the space race, having proven that an extended stay on the Moon and on-site scientific research is feasible. In response, the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory takes a vote and releases the Apollo Guidance Computer blueprints. The university president censors the move, and the release is formally retracted, but not before copies begin circulating.

February 11, 1970: Lambda-4S is launched. Japan becomes the sixth nation with orbital capabilities.

April 13, 1970: Apollo 13 suffers a near-fatal accident with the service module power system. The Apollo 10 crew are called back to NASA to assist in devising a way to return their former colleagues to Earth in one piece. The plan to use the LEM's descent stage engine, which has been redesigned to allow for multiple ignitions, succeeds, and effort is successful, with all three astronauts returning home safely after a lunar pass.

April 24, 1970: Long March 1 is launched. China becomes the seventh nation with orbital capabilities.

April 1, 1971: Salyut 1 is launched. The world's first space station is intended to act as a training facility for bases in Moon orbit or its surface. It proves barely adequate, and it's decided to deorbit it at the end of its service life, instead of kicking it into lunar orbit after two crew rotations as was originally planned.

December 2, 1971: Mars-3 lands on the red planet, after a number of earlier Soviet attempts the last two of which resulted in crashes. The craft operates for all of 14.5 seconds and returns skewed telemetry, but the readings it returns hint at unicellular or even simple pluricellular plant life. Despite the possible finding, Roskosmos and NASA face political pressure to focus on their competing manned programs, and after a few days of wild speculation the matter is largely relegated to scientific papers and the specialist press.

May 4, 1973: Skylab is launched; damage to the solar arrays almost renders the station inoperable. On the same day, Salyut 2 is launched unmanned into a high lunar orbit - the navigation system goes silent during the translunar injection burn, and the station is lost. Skylab is later jury-rigged to operate on partial power.

December 10, 1973: Newly inaugurated President Ford indicates that a "space station gap" with the Soviets might compromise the balance of power in the world. Funding for Skylab 2 eventually passes Congress, on condition that it be available for Air Force training.

July 15-29, 1974: The Apollo-Salyut Test Project completes successfully, with the Apollo 21 craft docking to Salyut-3's rear port. Nationalist elements in both countries decry the project, with American religious figure and author Tim LaHaye proclaiming that it is the beginning of a one-world government on the Moon. This mission marks the first mixed-nationality crew in space, and the first fully operational lunar orbit station.

July 20, 1975: At 08:51 UTC, the Viking Lander touches down on Chryse Planitia on Mars, returning images of sparse but thriving lichens. The news spreads across the globe like wildfire, only to be followed by the disappointing update that the simple lifeforms are most likely a result of accidental contamination from the Mars-1 lander. Various space agencies begin planning a sample-return mission to solve the issue.

January 21, 1976: French-British "Concorde" spaceplane completes its first orbit. Among the fifteen passengers are Aldrin, Volkov, and Young's mother, who spent exactly one day in jail for manhandling Nixon.

September 3, 1976: The Viking I lander confirms that simple plant life exists on Mars, although the onboard instruments offer no way to tell whether it is indigenous or a result of contamination from earlier crashes.

March 11, 1977: Following installation of a greenhouse module, the Taurus-Littrow base becomes the first "self-sufficient" settlement on another celestial body. President Carter states on the record that his "Habitat for Humanity" initiative has given Americans their lead in the space race back - the Soviets may have had a permanent presence on the Moon for longer, but it is by planting and harvesting that a place is truly colonized.

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January 17, 1998: The multinational Golden Crown Aldrin-cycler craft successfully splits the component modules away from its frame for reentry at the planned colony sites on Mars. During the voyage, crews have mingled somewhat.

March 3, 1998: The Russian Social Republic Patent Office rules in favor of Raytheon on the Apollo 10 complaint. Compensation is paid in full... in nearly worthless old-denomination Soviet-era rubles.

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September 11, 2001: A terror attack on the Arecibo space telescope leaves religious fanatics in control of the facility for 36 hours. During that time, they manage to deorbit or brick over 80% of the international deep space network thanks to it having designed for interoperability rather than security. Ten minutes of worldwide panic, and thousands of deaths from suicide and looting, occurs when - right before "pulling the plug" - they broadcast contradictory accounts of a massive nuclear launch. Presidents Gore and Putin quickly confirm via wired Internet and UHF radio that no nuclear launches have taken place, but the terrorists' is the last transmission that the Golden Crown relays to Mars from Earth; the spacecraft is then instructed by the terrorists to crash on Israel. American and British forces regain control of the facility in time to crash the Golden Crown half an orbit early, into the Pacific. Without any direct way to communicate with Mars to have them set up a wide antenna, and tasked with rebuilding essential Earth-facing communication infrastructure, the colonists' central governments will have to wait two to three years to send a conventional probe to the red planet, and much longer to build a second Aldrin cycler.

Apr 18 2002: Present day. While contact with Earth has not been reestablished, telescope observations confirm that if there was a nuclear exchange it was limited enough in scope to not have affected cloud cover. However, the colonist crews have largely divided across ideological lines in the aftermath of what they thought had been a global conflict; the original plan to colonize the Martian lowlands has resulted in a multitude of small settlements that eye each other with suspicion. On the plus side, the Martian summer is only beginning, making it a realistic possibility to grow crops with the relatively meager infrastructure that was brought in. Absent confirmation of the contrary, the colonists have to assume that they and the few people in orbit or on the Moon are the only technologically advanced humans left in the Solar System.